Accessing the index in for loops

Question

How do I access the index itself for a list like the following?

ints = [8, 23, 45, 12, 78]

When I loop through it using a for loop, how do I access the loop index, from 1 to 5 in this case?

Answer 1

Using an additional state variable, such as an index variable (which you would normally use in languages such as C or PHP), is considered non-pythonic.

The better option is to use the built-in function enumerate(), available in both Python 2 and 3:

for idx,val in enumerate(ints):
    print(idx, val)